River Walk

Morning dresses the Grand's

curved meander.

Sun has yet to penetrate,

delineate and define

with light; denounce

the lack of clarity

in shoreline trees —

five ducks tacking

lazy eddy, time looped

and looped again —

gold ring settled

on your finger reflecting

without presence.

It's difficult to cut

night from day

with surgical precision,

remove dark garments

from the hidden,

reveal faces in a face,

translate our language

from the fog's

pidgin silence.

Ethics

Our long goodbye begins in the middle

of hello, morning, roses opening to sunshine

or rain. An ill-conceived path tracks

the lawn's undulations, ends abruptly at

the fence, where another world begins.

You're familiar with other worlds,

I'm not. The clay, which constricts the garden,

chokes the roses and the radishes, that clay

defines me too well. I'm not malleable,

not a flimsy umbrella in a rainstorm,

Superman in a telephone booth, caught

between identities. I'm the man who

secretly cries at all the right times

while watching a 'chic flick', sings along

in the silence of elevators, believes

every lie as though it's the genesis

of another universe. I'm the man

at the end of a garden pathway,

looking with longing into his neighbour's

back yard, wondering where you're going

and memorizing six tender scenes

which will make Shane come back.

For The Dramatic Woman I Met On A Toronto Street

Just like, reminds me of —
do you feel the pressure?

Less than a ten-word necklace
and already your head is —

in the oven of summer, birds
drone the air below
threatening clouds, bifurcate
between buildings

and the stream of consciousness
parades past primordial
concrete constructs.

You stroll the promenade mall,
primitive primate hunting
the ultimate toaster,

the idealized id, the question
of what exists between
money and earth mounds
flattened by falling time.

In muzak you are born,
in Freud you die, in life
you are challenged
to perform — street musician

riffing out your, riffing out
your, riffing out your
very last thoughts.

Lost Children

This is an ingrown toenail.
Something from the end of the universe,
somewhere in the arc of the belly flop
back, separated from the handholds
of the expected. Somehow cobbled together,
an old leather shoe with distance scrawled
across the sole, in an almost illegible hand,
with a dull pencil and a duller intent.
Something that presses against
a queue of events, with runaway emotions
looking for a destination, a track. Somewhere
after the canal through trees, past
streets languid with dawn. Stretching
in a jagged curve with a painful moan.
Somewhat lost and somewhat compressed
with an unknown fear. A band of words,
a camaraderie of phrases, the ping-pong path
of an atom through atoms, a foghorn
during a storm, trying to articulate a message
that must be relayed.

Cinquain

Life is

like colliding

atoms — you never hit

the same atom every time

you try.

Anniversaries

God sells tacos at that corner place —
the one I passed each weekday last winter,
snow falling like Mexican jumping beans —
falling onto La Cucaracha traffic.

It was the season of the living snowman,
appearing in front yards, brazen in
his bravado, his lack of understanding
that time is transient, not a local fixture.

Spring arrived jazz blues — warmer days
cut into frozen snow nights, crocuses rousing,
stretching their arms — supplicants
to the returning warmth of Eden.

This is a year now and leaves fall, scratch
across sidewalks and yards, obliterate
the green and gray — those days which
stretch through the heart of will.

I no longer understand the difference
between heaven and hell, the difference
between you here and gone, or whether
I purchase tacos from God, or just walk on.